


Nordic Combined

by Kestrel337



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Cross Country Skiing, F/M, Ski Jumping, mention of child murder, sports AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-14
Updated: 2014-02-14
Packaged: 2018-01-12 07:45:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1183711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kestrel337/pseuds/Kestrel337
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a former ski jumper meets a former cross country skier, two hearts become one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nordic Combined

**Author's Note:**

> I own nobody and nothing. This is an AU in which England has 1) ski jumping venues, 2) competitive cross country skiing, and 3) enough snow to make these viable. 
> 
> No disrespect is intended and no profit is made. 
> 
> Thanks to LonghornLetters and HedgeHogandOtter for beta work and encouragement.

**Ski Jumping**

In her youth, the time before medical school, Molly Hooper knew how to fly. She lived for the thrill of pushing off the bar, knees bent hard and butt tucked low. She delighted in roaring down the in-run, thrusting with her legs, cocking her ankles to pull her skis into a V. She loved hearing the wind urging her to be _still, still, still,_ not to flail against the pull of gravity. There was pleasure on the ground too: in the control of a perfect landing with one foot cocked forward and arms outspread, in timing her skid to throw ice crystals over the spectators in a cascade of pure joy. Of course she knew the pain of a bad in-run, a flubbed take-off, a flawed landing. The snow in her face, up the sleeve of her jumpsuit. The embarrassment and frustration of picking herself up, collecting her far-flung skis, listening to her coach’s assessment of what, exactly, had happened to send it all wrong. Sometimes it was the wind, sometimes the equipment or conditions. An athlete who wanted to be competitive knew how to read the conditions and work with the wind, so it generally came down to what Molly hadn’t noticed or done. When that happened, she would grit her teeth, tighten her ponytail, and march up the wooden stairs to try again. Her father pinned pictures up at his desk, glowing with pride when the other cops praised her courage. Her mother would smile, and try not to fret about Molly’s future even as she suggested practical careers that might suit her daughter’s temperament and overcome her disinterest in traditional classroom pursuits. 

Cancer changed everything. Molly began thinking about her future while watching her father die by inches, eased in his final passage by a palliative care team. Watching how they left his dignity and pride intact, even as they assisted in this most personal and private of tasks, Molly decided to try for nursing school. She poured her energies into her studies, visited the jumps less often, rarely competed. When she looked at the awards hanging from her bedroom shelves, there was no pang of nostalgia. She’d go back someday, perhaps as a coach. And there was a certain sense of pride in earning academic accolades. Hard work, dedication, reward; this was just a different kind of flying.

In all probability she would have become an excellent hospice nurse if not for her teenage job of minding seven year old Jennifer. She adored Molly with the full-on ferocity of the very young, presenting her with drawings of rainbows and orange unicorns, saving the best stickers for her idol. Molly loved her in return, encouraging her dreams of becoming an astronaut, or the next Jane Goodall, or one of Madonna’s backup singers. But such dreams were not to be. Between school bell and afternoon snack, Jennifer was gone, the victim of an act of senseless brutality that shredded the peace of their neighborhood. There was little doubt about who had committed the crime, but a botched postmortem meant her killer walked free. 

Here was a different opportunity, one which might allow Molly to impose some order into a world that suddenly made little sense. Molly studied the educational requirements and job descriptions. Doctor as detective…it held a great deal of appeal. But if nursing school was competitive, medical school was daunting indeed, and it was only the first step of a lengthy and demanding path. Only by giving her absolute best, all of it and every day, could she be the one to ensure the guilty were locked away. She knew she was smart enough, but did she have the dedication? One look at Jennifer’s parents, the procedural miscarriage that dealt the final blow to their foundering marriage, and she knew. The day they moved out, headed to opposite sides of the country, she gave her skis a final coat of wax and stored them away, high in the rafters of the garden shed. Her studies were everything now, success measured in test scores rather than meters of flight. Nobody was surprised when she soared into and through medical school. 

She tried to keep a weather eye on the sport even as she served the long hours of her residency. She knew it was growing, helped along by dedicated and passionate young women who weren’t willing to take ‘no’ for an answer. The statement from a top ski federation official, that it didn’t seem like a good idea for women to ski jump ‘from a medical point of view’, induced an explosive outburst of incredulous fury with her then-boyfriend as the unwitting target. Nigel had listened, wide eyed, occasionally trying to interject but falling silent until her wrath wound down. She’d taken several deep breaths, apologized for her temper, kissed him, and gestured for him to speak. He’d hesitated only a moment before venturing, “But, Mols, what if he’s right?” 

It was a spectacular row, ending with Nigel and his spare clothes on the kerb. Molly’s righteous victory was marred, though, by Nigel’s accusation that she was trying to live vicariously through the young women who still knew how to fly. Possibly he was correct, and that would never do. The past was past, over and gone, and Molly Hooper was making a name for herself in the field of Forensic Pathology. Distractions were unwelcome. She packed up her boots, her medals and ribbons, and tucked the box away in the bottom of her wardrobe.

~~**~~

**Cross Country Skiing**

Sometimes, when he was wrapped up in the hurly-burly of city cop life, Greg Lestrade remembered the solitude and comparative silence of deep winter. It had been his mother who taught him how to ski, slowing down her own competitive _kick-glide_ so he could keep pace with his shorter legs. She hadn’t had to hold back for very long. It had been a heady rush the first time he’d piped out “Track, Momma! Track!” and she’d yielded to his speed. But it wasn’t competition that he craved, much as he enjoyed overtaking and powering down the trail. The rhythmic sizzle and slide beneath his feet, the cold against his face, the dark trees against the clear blue sky, these were the things that fed his spirit. Winter wasn’t gentle, wasn’t soft, but it offered its own harsh beauty and welcome. On the weekends, faint rainbow sun-dogs kept him company across the fields. Weeknights, in the early winter dark, the smell of woodsmoke guided him home. He watched the stars, and contemplated purchasing ski-skates for summer. Of course, sometimes things went badly; a boot-lace broke, a binding was loose, he took a turning too tightly and crashed hard. He learned to carry extra laces, kept a repair kit in his bag, and became adept at assessing the conditions of the track. The words ‘self-reliance’ became part of his vocabulary decades after the practice had become part of his being. The time he’d used the wrong color wax, been forced back to the waxing hut to scrape off every bit of the gummy mess, there’d been nobody else to berate. So he’d ironed, and scraped, and dabbed and corked, and maybe hitting the trail later than he’d intended helped him set a new personal best and maybe it didn’t. But he’d set it, and written it down in his pocket notebook, and treated himself to an underage libation on the grounds that he was celebrating. If his mother sometimes sighed that he didn’t care to compete against anything other than some better vision of himself, she knew enough not to press. Everyone had to find their own track, after all, and he was as protective of her competitive spirit as she was of his preference for solitary discipline. 

And then he’d visited London, for some dimly-remembered family event. Had watched the cops visit the hotel room down the hall, had answered questions about what he’d seen and heard. It was fascinating. And they’d praised him for the things he’d noticed, suggested he might consider a career in law-enforcement. Well, why not? He’d always known a desk job wasn’t in his future. London was amazing, filled with sights and sounds and tastes and so many people with so many stories. And the camaraderie he witnessed left him with a craving he’d never felt before, the satisfaction of which seemed as essential to his life as coffee and bread and the winter sky.

At first he’d gone home at the weekends, skied and visited friends and skied and helped his aging parents and skied. But a weekend spent pubbing gave way to another spent revising. “I’ll get back to it in a few weeks, when things die down a bit” was enough for him to miss an entire season. Then came the weekend shifts, and a girlfriend who expressed the not unreasonable expectation that she receive at least _some_ of his non-work time. By the time they were married, he’d reluctantly admitted that skiing and city living were pretty much incompatible. It was the only drawback to an otherwise satisfying life, so the skis remained in storage and Greg Lestrade remained in London, kicking and gliding on a new sort of track. 

~~**~~

**Nordic Combined**

 

They’d never have gotten together if it hadn’t been for the corpse. Or maybe it was because Sherlock did actually have a limited knowledge base, and didn’t recognize the substance under John Doe’s fingernails. It had taken Molly about three delicate sniffs to determine that it was probably ski wax, and Greg less than that to determine that it was hard rather than klister. Sherlock had been rendered speechless, always an occasion of note, and the next time Greg had called round to Baker Street the flat had smelled like the waxing huts of his youth. John shuffled the blocks of Swix and Toko out of the way, thanking him for a quiet couple of weeks. Keeping Sherlock busy had been, at that point, the icing on the cake. Because over the corpse of a ski instructor -murdered by a jealous husband, boring- he and Molly had shared hesitant grins. _You know skiing?_ and _Did we really just get one up on Sherlock?_

In all likelihood it was down to John, giving Greg the wingman nudge-and-nod, though Greg had been out of the dating scene long enough that he almost missed the significance. But Molly had dimpled and agreed to drinks at the pub, and that had gone well enough that he’d asked her for dinner the following week. Dinner out led to dinner in, and very soon they’d established comfortable routine of getting together when they had concurrent free Saturdays. Molly, it turned out, was not shy about expressing her opinion when they watched whatever winter sports coverage was available. Their interests didn’t quite intersect, but there was sufficient overlap to make the differences more fascinating than frustrating. 

Fascinating indeed, when he learned exactly what sort of skiing she’d done. He’d asked her why she kept it a secret, and she’d volleyed the question right back at him. They’d had a good ironic laugh over that, but it did open the gate. Greg talked of chasing the aurora borealis and how he’d imagined they might sound cold and hard like a crystalline choir. Molly suggested that they might sound not entirely unlike hundreds of cowbells clamoring in celebration. Together they reminisced about toes going from cold to painful to numb, and about how no matter how many hot-handz you bought at the beginning of the season it was never enough. 

Molly asked for his help finding a frame shop to make a shadowbox for her medals. He taught her how to cross country ski, which wasn’t too difficult once she’d stopped getting her poles tangled with his. Pretty soon, she was passing him on all the downhill stretches and he was learning skate style because it was such fun to chase her. 

When they moved in together, as soon as they’d painted the living room, they hung a pair of crossed skis over the fireplace, with Molly’s medal box displayed right below.


End file.
